If you are playing competitive magic, you should know what a vast majority of cards in a given format do. I really like how japanese cards look and I have a UB faeries deck in all japanese. Why should I care that you don't know what spellstutter sprite does?

Do you know exactly how many cards are legal in Modern*, as of the time I'm writing this?

11,084.

The "vast majority" of that is still an obscenely large number to keep track of.

*I know you didn't say Modern, but there's not really a competitive format that includes U/B Faeries that has a smaller card pool than Modern.

I can name exactly one person who likes the Duel Decks and prefers to play Magic with them, and that's Tom Vasel (link to relevant Dice Tower podcast here). For someone that plays 853 different games every week, he can just pick them up and play with a friend without wasting time trying to build his own decks.

Cards don't get the chance to be super-lustworthy nowadays because they're so disposable. Every two months, a new batch of cards comes out and the hype machine no longer cares about what was hot two months ago.

There is no 'baseline' anymore like we had with Alpha or the core sets back in the 90s. Even Hearthstone gives everyone a baseline by keeping the Classic set in print at all times, immune to the rotation of everything else.

Try this. Assume the mythics have a perfect 1/8 distribution. We all know they don't, but for simplicity, go with it. Now take 800 packs put them in 100 groups of 8 where the 1/8 ratio holds. Now, have one person pick 1 random pack of from 80 different sets and a second person select 10 groups of eight. Now, calculate the odds based on probabilities of who gets the most mythics based on the fact they opened the same amount of packs.

While I get what you're trying to say, what you're saying isn't quite true. Both players will have the same average number of mythics pulled, but the one who opens the random packs will have a higher standard deviation - they're less likely to end up with exactly ten mythics than the person who pulled 10 groups of eight, but the times they pull more than ten will cancel out the times they pull less than ten.